Kirkham faced Chinese forces in Korea

Tuesday

Dec 10, 2013 at 12:01 AMDec 10, 2013 at 12:15 AM

By Patti StoneFor The Ledger

Charles Kirkham and his fellow soldiers didn’t know if they would make it out of the beachhead alive. Sgt. 1st Class Kirkham was with the 39th Field Battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division in the Yalu River region in North Korea when Chinese forces marched south, necessitating a withdrawal of U.S. and British troops.

According to Kirkham, the Chinese took everyone by surprise when they headed into Korea. “While we were at the Yalu River, that’s when the Chinese came around both sides of us and surrounded us and got behind us,” Kirkham recalled.

The decision was made to evacuate the UN troops and form a beachhead at Hungnam.

Kirkham was 17 when he enlisted in the Army in November of 1948. He wanted to leave Ellwood to see something different, and he wasn’t disappointed. He enjoyed basic training in Fort Knox, Ky. “Everything was different … it was interesting. It was an adventure … something you weren’t used to,” he said.

Basic lasted eight weeks, followed by 14-15 weeks of leadership and drill instructor training where Kirkham, a kid fresh out of basic, found himself training others. It wasn’t easy. “It was hard because most of them were older than me,” Kirkham recalled. Some new recruits gave him a hard time, but he dealt with it. “You had the stripe on and you had the authority … you could make them do what you said.”

Being a drill instructor wasn’t to his liking, so Kirkham transferred to Fort Benning, Ga., for artillery training in April of 1949, where he spent a year and a half before shipping off to Korea with the 3rd Infantry Division in August of 1950.

He viewed the journey to Korea as another adventure. “It was something different — going on a boat, going overseas. That was exciting.”

The boat trip took 19 days. While at sea, they trained to invade Inchon, but Inchon was invaded by UN forces before their arrival, so they headed to Japan for six weeks of training in the mountains, which are similar in climate and terrain to the mountains of Korea.

Kirkham remembers his arrival in Korea, "When we got off the boat it was really cold — 24-30 below.” Their mission was to push the North Korean troops north toward the Yalu River. They never stayed more than a couple of weeks in one place, Kirkham recalled. “We didn’t have a home base. We lived off the land.”

Civilians heading south were a warning that the North Korean army was near. Kirkham described the mass exodus of the villagers, “You could always tell when North Koreans were invading because the villagers would evacuate — all the women and children … you could see them walking down the road. The North Koreans would kill anybody. They’d shoot anybody.” Kirkham also remembered the villagers had no horses and needed to get in front of and behind their carts, pushing and pulling in order to transport their belongings.

Kirkham recalled that it took six weeks of fighting the North Korean troops to reach the Yalu River. Once there — the Chinese invaded. When the Chinese army entered Korea, the decision was made for the UN troops to retreat to the coast for an evacuation by sea. Kirkham’s outfit was ordered to proceed ahead and establish and hold a beachhead at Hungnam to provide a safe passage for the other troops. “We had to hold the beachhead while the rest of the troops came back,” he said.

Beginning on the 15th of December, the USS Saint Paul arrived at Hungnam to defend the beachhead from the advancing Chinese and commenced shooting with eight inch and five inch guns. The USS Rochester also joined the mission, but it was the Battleship Missouri with its 16 inch rifles that Kirkham remembers. Kirkham also remembers hooking up guns to the back of trucks, jumping onto the trucks and driving them onto the boats, “We had to just jump into the trucks and the trucks drove onto the boats and the boats pulled out.”

When asked what his thoughts were during the dangerous withdrawal, Kirkham replied, “You had a job to do. You went ahead and did it. You didn’t think much about it. You could get killed anywhere. There was always a chance of that. When you’re young, you don’t think about things like that.”

The evacuees included over 100 thousand military and around 90 thousand civilians. According to Kirkham, the civilians “would have been happy to go on a canoe.”

Kirkham’s unit was the last to leave Hungnam before the Navy Demolition team, or “frogmen,” as Kirkham referred to them. The Underwater Demolition Team rigged the Hungnam harbor to deprive the advancing communists of anything of military value. The charges were detonated on the 24th after the demolition team’s departure.

It took five days by boat to arrive in Pusan, South Korea. Kirkham had his Christmas dinner after leaving the boat. He hated sweet potatoes before that day, but has liked them ever since.

Kirkham’s division spent two to three weeks at Pusan regrouping and taking in new recruits before they headed back north and “dug in” around Seoul, but peace talks had commenced, and the war was at a standstill. “I was sent home while peace talks were still going on. I left around Nov. 1 and took a boat home.”

He was discharged from Indiantown Gap, Pa., and from there returned to Ellwood. He was ready to come home. “It was a little over three years, and that was enough,” he said.

A month after returning home, Kirkham went to work for Aetna Standard for 34 years before going to Herr Voss Inc., from where he retired.

Kirkham returned to Korea for six months in 1995 while working as a field engineer for Herr Voss. He said Korea was “completely different … Seoul was like downtown New York. They had skyscrapers and 14 million people.”

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